Burns and 'Blue Devilism'

Burns Chronicle, (2018), pp.34-42 An adapted version of the paper delivered at the 2017 Centre for Robert Burns Studies annual conference. This article lays out initial findings relating to the testing of the hypothesis that Robert Burns, Scotland's national bard, was affected by what we would now recognise as a clinical mood disorder.

Studies in Romanticism, 1997

The Drouth, 2007

Journal of Advances and Scholarly Researches in Allied Education, 2018

Robert Burns occupies a significant place in the History of English Poetry. He has been studied from different perspectives, but no detailed study of his social philosophy has been made so far. He has a tendency to weave his personal moods and experiences into the texture of his poems so that they become a mirror of the bundle of contradictory traits in his complex personality. He is regarded as an 'untutored peasant' on the one hand and venerated as a 'social and literary rebel' on the other. This paper explores the various aspects of Burns' ideas and art in their comprehensiveness rather than in isolation. Some of the major aspects of his poetry chosen for the purpose are his sensibility, radicalism and realism, frustration and disappointment and his bucolic humour as a challenge to the opposing forces. The present paper attempts to fill up a gap in the criticism of Burns poetry by highlighting certain important aspects of his poetry. An attempt has been made to present a deeper insight into the creative process of Burns.

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

This paper revisits and reevaluates the Eriksonian branch of psycho-historians, whose academic influence peaked in the early 1970s before falling largely out of sight by the start of the twenty-first century. Why did what I argue was an unwarranted eclipse occur? The foremost figures in this loose grouping were Erikson himself, Robert J. Lifton, Kenneth Keniston, and Robert Coles. What can the comparatively new field of psychosocial studies usefully learn and integrate from these mostly neglected predecessors? I examine how this widespread academic amnesia set in and explain the relevance of the Eriksonian tradition, relate ways in which psycho-historians trailblazed psychosocial studies, address the importance of an intrinsic ''activist ingredient'' in such ventures, and argue that both psychohistory and psychosocial studies stand to benefit greatly from such an intellectual exchange.

Robert Burns has long been recognised as someone who experienced episodes of melancholia, but no detailed, systematic and objective assessment of his mental health has been undertaken. We tested a novel methodology, combining psychiatric and literary approaches, to assess the feasibility of using Burns's extensive personal correspondence as a source of evidence for assessing the presence of symptoms of a clinically significant mood disorder. We confirmed the potential of this approach and identified putative evidence of episodes of depression and hypomania within the correspondence. While not conclusive of a formal diagnosis of bipolar disorder, this work highlights a need for further systematic examination of Burns's mental health and how this may have influenced his work. This file includes the appendices of supplementary information.

Scottish Literary Review, 2018

Psychiatric Times, 2013

As our medical schools and graduate programs fill with students who were born after 1989, we meet young mental health professionals-in-training who have no knowledge or living memory of the Satanic ritual abuse (SRA) moral panic of the 1980s and early 1990s. To those of us who are old enough to have been there, that era already seems like a curious relic of the past, bracketed in our memory palaces behind a door we are loathe to open again. Source: Some mass cultural phenomena are so emotionally-charged, so febrile, and in retrospect so causally incomprehensible, that we feel compelled to move on silently and feign forgetfulness. Historian Alfred Crosby noted these "peculiarities of human memory" in the 1976 first edition of his book, America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918. 1 "Why have (Americans) so thoroughly forgotten it since?" he asked. 1(p319) Until Crosby's book appeared, even historians had avoided the painful subject for 50 years. Without resorting to psychiatric or psychoanalytic explanations, Crosby speculated that any mass event that had "enormous influence" but that "utterly evades logical analysis" might justify our ignorance of it "because the alternative would be to sink into the quicksand of speculation without any limits." 1(p322)

This essay appears courtesy of the Burns Chronicle and the Robert Burns World Federation. All rights reserved.

This essay presents a critical appreciation of the work of J. DeLancey Ferguson, a noted Burns critic of the twentieth century.

2018

has researched and published extensively on musics of India, the Caribbean, Spain, and elsewhere. His several books include Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae, and Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India. An occasional performer of sitar, flamenco guitar, and highland bagpipes, he teaches ethnomusicology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.